WE CAN'T START TO REBUILD THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS UNTIL WE PUSH MEXICO BACK OVER OUR OPEN BORDERS!.....“The cost of the Dream Act is far bigger than the Democrats or their media allies admit. Instead of covering 690,000 younger illegals now enrolled in former President Barack Obama’s 2012 “DACA” amnesty, the Dream Act would legalize at least 3.3 million illegals, according to a pro-immigration group, the Migration Policy Institute.”

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Unions Join the Democrat Party in the War on the American (Legals) Worker

OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS:
TRANSFERRING THE ECONOMY TO THE RICHEST, KEEPING THE BORDERS WIDE OPEN
TO FOR ENDLESS FLOODS OF ILLEGALS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND ENDLESS
CORPORATE WELFARE AND BAILOUT FOR THEIR CRONIES ON WALL STREET.

"Under the Obama administration, the Democrats have spearheaded
the attack on wages and benefits for higher paid workers as part of an
overall transfer of wealth to the financial elite."

California Democrats, unions announce deal on $15 minimum wage

By Marc Wells

30 March 2016

On Monday, California Governor Jerry Brown praised a tentative
agreement reached two days earlier between state legislators and trade
union leaders that, if finalized by the state assembly, would gradually
increase California’s minimum wage to $15 by 2022.

The
deal, which has many loopholes and conditions, is aimed at containing
deep opposition to poverty-level wages. Its basic political purpose is
to bolster support for the Democratic Party in the run-up to November’s
elections.Under the
Obama administration, the Democrats have spearheaded the attack on
wages and benefits for higher paid workers as part of an overall
transfer of wealth to the financial elite.

The
agreement in California would raise the state-wide minimum wage from
its current level of $10 an hour to $10.50 in 2017, $11 in 2018, and one
dollar more per year through 2022. Businesses with fewer than 25
employees would have an additional year to comply.

Stressing
the conditional character of the proposed measure, Brown said on
Monday, “This plan raises the minimum wage in a careful and responsible
way and provides some flexibility if economic and budgetary conditions
change.” The governor can suspend any wage increase in the
event of a recession, an increase in the state budget deficit or higher official unemployment.

In
other words, the measure would be subordinated to “the vagaries of the
capitalist economy,” as Brown put it. This includes no guarantee that
workers currently making minimum wage will not be fired by the companies
they work for.

If adopted, the deal would
likely be followed by the suspension of two ballot initiatives sponsored
by different sections of the union apparatus, particularly the Service
Employees International Union
(SEIU), for the November elections.
These measures would have increased the minimum wage to $15 an hour by
2021 or 2022. By removing the issue from the ballot, legislators can
ensure that the details can becarefully crafted behind closed doors in
consultation with businesses.

BLOG: CA HANDS ILLEGALS $30 BILLION IN SOCIAL SERVICES ON THE STATE LEVEL ALONE. COUNTIES PAY OUT EVEN MORE.

HALF THE POPULATION OF CA IS MEXICAN AND LA RAZA NOW CONTROLS BOTH HOUSES OF THE STATE LEGISLATURE.Poverty-level
wages are pervasive throughout California and nationally, and the
current minimum wage is grossly inadequate to meet basic necessities.

According
to Rainmaker Insights, average monthly housing costs in San Francisco
are $3,770, and in Los Angeles $2,094. That is, average housing costs in
these two cities are the equivalent of a full-time job paying $21.75
and $12.08 an hour, respectively, before taxes.

California’s
cost of living is 151 percent of the national average, making it the
fifth most expensive state. More than 40 percent of the state’s
population lives either in poverty (earning less than about
$24,000
per year for a family of four) or near poverty, according to Census
data released in 2013. Children are worse off: nearly 50 percent were
poor or near poor in 2013.

Under these
conditions, the trade unions—closely allied with the Democratic Party
and supported by various organizations that operate in its orbit—have
advanced campaigns like “Fight for $15” and “Raise the Wage” to keep
opposition within a framework acceptable to the ruling class.

In
the presidential elections, Democratic Party candidate Bernie Sanders
has backed a $15 nationwide minimum wage, while Clinton has supported
raising the national rate to $12 an hour. Sanders’ role in
particular
has been to appeal to sections of youth and poorer workers in an effort
to bolster the Democratic Party, after more than seven years of the
Obama administration presiding over continuing austerity for the working
class.

The Obama administration and the
Democrats, no less than the Republicans, have supported the overall
assault on wages for the working class as a whole. Tellingly, in
California the median wage earner saw a decline of 6.2 percent in their
annual income between 2006 and 2011, triple the national average. This
included the years of Obama’s so-called economic recovery.

Nationally,
the White House sounded the signal for a nationwide attack on wages
through the restructuring of the auto industry in 2009, crafting a deal
that halved wages for new hires and relieved companies of their health
care obligations to retirees. This has been combined with the provisions
of the Affordable Care Act, which have encouraged companies to
eliminate health care plans and force workers to purchase insurance from
private companies.

Increasingly, $15 is
seen by the ruling class not so much as a minimum but as a maximum. What
were formerly higher paying jobs, including in manufacturing, are now
paying rates equivalent to low-wage service work.

In
the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, moreover, low-wage
employment has been replacing jobs that once paid a decent salary. In an
earlier period, minimum wage jobs were mostly reserved for those
initially entering the workforce. Recent data from the Center for
Economic and Policy Research, however, shows that now only 12 percent of
minimum wage workers are teenagers.

From
the standpoint of the unions, a major aim is not only to promote the
Democratic Party but also to ensure their own position as junior
partners benefiting from the exploitation of the working class. In the
last few years, the unions have negotiated agreements with companies
that contain “escape clauses” relating to the minimum wage. Through
these contractual or legal mechanisms, the unions have been able to
bypass minimum wage requirements, thus leaving unionized workers earningless than the minimum wage.

The
process is so effective that even the US Chamber of Commerce admitted
its advantages for employers. In a recent report, it noted that the
escape clause “is often designed to encourage unionization by making a
labor union the potential ‘low-cost’ alternative to new wage mandates,
and it raises serious questions about whom these minimum wage laws are
actually intended to benefit.”

Lastly,
an increase in wages to above poverty levels is seen as beneficial by
sections of the ruling class insofar as it will force reduce eligibility
for social programs such as Medi-Cal, the medical program for the poor,
whose threshold is set to 138 percent of the federal poverty level.
Workers not qualifying for Medi-Cal would then be subject to the
requirements of Obama’s Affordable Care Act that they purchase insurance
from private companies on state-run exchanges.

Study: Employment rate of illegal immigrant men far higher than for legal immigrants and natives

A new study
by George Borjas from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard University reveals what many have long been concerned about when
it comes to illegal immigration into the United States.According
to Borjas' paper, the "employment rate of undocumented men is 86.6%, as
compared to 73.9% for natives and 77.8% for legal immigrants," and this
gap has been widening since the mid-1990s.

The
study shows that about 10% of all persons in their early 30s are
undocumented. In addition, 23% of illegal immigrants live in California,
7% reside in New York, and 15% live in Texas.Borjas reached the following conclusions:

Even
after the regression exhaustively controls for... skill differences --
and adjusts for the possibility that economic conditions varied
dramatically over time for each of the narrowly defined skill groups, as
well as for the possibility that economic conditions varied
dramatically among the different geographic regions where the three
groups tend to settle -- it is still the case that the employment rate
of immigrants, and particularly that of undocumented immigrant men,
increased dramatically relative to that of native-born persons.

More
evidence that illegal immigrants are both taking jobs away from legal
Americans and undercutting their wage bargaining power.

US employment report: Payrolls rise, wages fall

By Barry Grey5 March 2016

President Barack Obama seized on
the February employment report, released Friday morning by the Labor
Department, to tout the supposed “success” of his economic policies and
paint a picture of a thriving US economy. The report, which showed a
larger-than-predicted growth in private nonfarm payrolls of 242,000
jobs, confirmed that the US economy was “the envy of the world,” Obama
told reporters at a White House appearance.

“The fact
of the matter is that the plans that we have put in place to grow the
economy have worked,” he boasted.” He derided “an alternative reality
out there from some of the political folks that America is down in the
dumps.” He countered, “America is pretty darn great right now.”

He
did not attempt to explain why the “alternative reality,” which his
labor secretary, Thomas Perez, attributed to “fear-mongers and
fact-deniers,” is believed by tens of millions of Americans, whose anger
over economic injustice is dramatically reflected in the current
election campaign.

One does not have to look too
closely at the Labor Department’s report, however, to get an idea of
what is fueling the social indignation of working people in the eighth
and final year of the Obama administration. Behind the top-line number
for new jobs and the quasi-fictional official unemployment rate of only
4.9 percent, ongoing trends with disastrous consequences for the working
class are evident. They account for two other important indices in the
report: a decline in average earnings from the previous month of 3
cents, or 0.1 percent, to $25.35, bringing the increase for the year
down to just 2.2 percent, and a fall in the average private-sector
workweek of 0.2 hours to 34.4 hours, a two-year low.

These
two figures arise from the fact that the vast bulk of new jobs created
in February were low-wage and a huge percentage were part-time. The
low-paying service sector—retail, bars and restaurants, health
care—accounted for 245,000 jobs. The reality of recession in basic
production was reflected in a 16,000 decline in manufacturing and the
loss of another 19,000 mining jobs, bringing to 171,000 the total
decline in mining since September 2014. The only better-paying
industrial sector that saw an increase was construction, which recorded a
gain of 19,000.

Another figure highlights the hollow
and socially regressive character of Obama’s so-called “recovery.” The
financial cable network CNBC pointed out that according to the Labor
Department’s household survey, which is the basis for the unemployment
rate figure (the figure on payroll growth is derived from a separate
survey of business establishments), full-time jobs increased in February
by only 65,000, while part-time positions increased by 489,000. This
means that a mere 11.7 percent of new jobs in February were full-time!

These
statistics point to the fact that the American ruling class, through
its instrument, the Obama administration, has utilized the financial
crash of 2008, for which it was responsible, to fundamentally reorganize
the US economy, transforming it into a low-wage system. The millions of
decent-paying jobs that were destroyed have been largely replaced by
poverty-wage, part-time and temporary jobs.

The median
household income has fallen sharply. Pensions and health benefits have
been gutted, schools closed by the thousands, teachers and other public
workers laid off by the millions. At the other end, the Federal Reserve
and the US Treasury have pumped trillions of dollars into the financial
markets, driving up the stock market and bringing the concentration of
wealth at the very top to unprecedented levels. This is what Obama lauds
as “success.”

Meanwhile, millions of Americans remain
mired in long-term unemployment. The number of long-term unemployed,
defined as without work for 27 weeks or more, was essentially unchanged
at 2.2 million in February. This number has not shifted significantly
since last June. The long-term jobless accounted last month for 27.7
percent of the unemployed, a far higher percentage than in any previous
period categorized as an economic recovery.

A broader
measure of unemployment that includes people working part-time but
wanting full-time work and those too discouraged to seek employment
registered 9.7 percent last month, nearly double the official jobless
rate. There are, in addition, millions of people who have dropped out of
the labor market and are not even counted in government employment
reports.

While the employment-to-population ratio edged
up to 59.8 percent and the labor force participation rate rose slightly
to 62.9 percent, both measures remain extraordinarily low by historical
standards.
The impact of soaring social inequality and falling
living standards for broad sections of the population is reflected in a
growing crisis in the retail sector. This week, sporting goods chain The
Sports Authority filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and
announced it was closing at least 140 of its 463 stores and laying off
3,400 of its 13,000 employees. This follows recent announcements by
Walmart, Sears/Kmart and Macy’s of hundreds of store closures and
thousands of layoffs.

...........................
Will Mexico elect America's next President? Didn't LA RAZA FASCIST
PARTY, which is funded by Barack Obama and operates out of the Obama
white house under Cecilia Munoz, reelect Obama???

DON'T BELIEVE THE LIES! IT'S ALL LA RAZA PROPAGANDA TO EXPAND MEXICO'S OCCUPATION!MILLIONS
OF MEXICANS HAVE MILLIONS OF AMERICAN JOBS WITH STOLEN IDENTITIES. THEY
ALSO DRIVE ILLEGALLY, CONTRACT ILLEGALLY AND SEND BACK TENS OF BILLIONS
IN DRUG PROFITS TO NARCOMEX.THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HAS LONG BEEN SABOTAGING STATES' ATTEMPT TO CURB LA RAZA FASCIST FROM VOTING.MEXICO KNOWS THAT THE 40 MILLION LOOTING MEXICANS DON'T HAVE TO BE "PERMANENT RESIDENTS" TO GO VOTE FOR MORE!HILLARY CLINTON HAS ALREADY PROMISED THE MEX OCCUPIERS 49 MORE MEXIFORNIAS!

March 21, 2016

Mexican government urging US immigrants to become citizens and vote

Mexican
consulates in the U.S. are hosting citizenship clinics across the
country, hoping to convince permanent residents from Mexico to become
U.S. citizens so they can vote against Donald Trump.The pious declaration from the Mexican government that they are not "interfering" in the U.S. election fails the smell test.Bloomberg:

Joel
Diaz doesn’t want to wait to see how it all turns out. The
Mexican-American, who has been a permanent resident of the U.S. for six
years, arrived at the Mexican consulate in Chicago on Saturday with his
wife and four adult sons to register all of them as U.S. citizens in
order to vote against Trump.

"We’re
very worried," Diaz, 47, an evangelical pastor, said. "If he wins there
will be a lot of damage against a lot of people here, and to us as
Hispanics, as Mexicans."

Laura
Espinosa, deputy consul in Mexico’s consulate in Las Vegas, said the
main goal of the program is citizenship, and while that includes the
right to vote, the government doesn’t press people to do so. "Those who
use this to vote, that’s up to each individual," said Espinosa, who
confirmed that most consulates have begun citizenship campaigns. "We
don’t have any opinion on that, because that would be totally
interfering in internal affairs of the country."

The
government in Mexico City is holding off on engaging the Trump campaign
directly until he becomes the nominee, said Francisco Guzman, chief of
staff to Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. Speaking with reporters
on March 1, Guzman said the government plans to communicate with the
campaigns of the nominees once they’re chosen and try to dispel what it
considers misinformation about Mexico and Mexicans.

The
public-relations offensive now under way includes using news outlets
and social media to highlight the strides Mexicans have made in
business, the arts and academia in the U.S., said Paulo Carreno, the
former spokesman of Citigroup Inc.’s Mexico unit who oversees the
country’s international branding strategy.

Promoting
Mexico in the U.S., from its scholars to artists, is meant "not to
influence an election, but a whole generation and those that follow,"
Carreno said in an e-mailed response to questions. "The strategy will be
an important anchor in our consular network in the country."

It
should be noted that the chances of the Mexican government succeeding
in getting enough of their people to become U.S. citizens so that they
can make a difference in the 2016 election are low. But over a period
of years, that could change – especially if the Republicans continue to
refuse to compete for the Hispanic vote. Immigration issues are not the
end-all and be-all for Hispanics in the U.S. They have the same
concerns as any American about the economy and the culture.

Not
even trying to persuade Hispanics that the GOP's agenda would be better
for them than the Democrats will continue to make any national election
and uphill climb for the Republican candidate.

..............
what would have happened to this once great nation if instead of
handing billions in welfare to criminal banksters, and millions of our
jobs to illegals.... we handed free education to America's youth.

but then we wouldn't need to import boatloads of educated people to take our tech jobs!!!

OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS:
TRANSFERRING THE NATION'S WEALTH TO THE 1%, JOBS AND WELFARE TO
ILLEGALS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND BUILD THE DEM PARTY BASE WITH MEX
FLAG WAVERS

“My greatest worry is working all my life, constantly chasing debt
and never being to own a house or have children,” writes a millennial
named “Gemma” in a section of the series entitled “#Itsnotjustyou: Millenials share their secret fears.”
Continuing, she states: “The cost of renting privately is rising, the
cost of travelling is rising, the cost of living is rising and yet the
salaries don’t reflect this rise. … I am worried that capitalism is
pushing this and creating a greater wealth inequality gap. It seems
unsustainable and to be driving people apart—a recent example is the
demonization of our own NHS service and the junior doctors.”

Study: Worsening conditions for young people throughout the developed world

By
Nick Barrickman
15 March 2016

Incomes for young people born between 1980 and 1994 have hit
unprecedented low levels in the aftermath of the 2008 financial
collapse, according to a recent investigative series conducted by the
UK’s Guardian publication titled “Millenials: The Trials of Generation Y.”
The study draws on income statistics from eight of the world’s 15 most
advanced economies, including the US, Canada, Great Britain, Australia,
France, Italy, Spain and Germany to paint a picture of dimming social
prospects for young people throughout the developed world.

The Guardian cites as contributing factors “a combination of
debt, joblessness, globalization, demographics and rising house prices”
which “have grave implications for everything from social cohesion to
family formation.” Whereas during the 1970s and 1980s people in their
20s averaged more than the national income, the study found that young
couples and families in five of the eight countries listed made 20
percent less than the rest of the population today.

“It is likely to be the first time in industrialized history, save
for periods of war or natural disaster, that the incomes of young adults
have fallen so far when compared with the rest of society,” the British
newspaper states.

In the US and Italy, incomes were lower in actual figures than they
were a generation ago, with Americans averaging a yearly salary of
$27,757 in 2010 compared to $29,638 in 1979. The study notes that young
US workers currently make less than those in retirement. In France,
households headed by individuals under the age of 50 made less
disposable income than recent retirees. In Italy, an 80-year-old
pensioner possesses more income than someone under the age of 35.

In many cases, the 2008 financial collapse simply accelerated trends
that were already underway. Housing prices in Great Britain and
Australia are among the most expensive in the developed world. The
average price for a home in Sydney, Australia, is $1 million in
Australian dollars, more than 12 times the median household income in
the city. The average home loan for first-time buyers in New South Wales
is A$424,000. This figure has increased by 43 percent in the past four
years alone.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, housing prices have
increased more sharply and for a longer period in the past 20 years
than at any time since 1880. The Guardian notes that housing
costs in the UK and Australia have been increasing at a “neck and neck”
pace ahead of the average household income. “We’re heading for a world
where rates of home ownership among young people are below 50 percent
for the first time,” states Alan Milburn of the Social Mobility and
Child Poverty Commission, adding that the UK is heading toward becoming
“a society that is permanently divided.” Income for those in their late
20s in the UK remain below levels seen in 2004-2005.

A recent survey by British polling firm Ipsos Mori found that 54
percent of those questioned thought the next generation was or would be
worse off than the previous. “It’s the highest we’ve measured—it’s
completely flipped around from April 2003,” stated Bobby Duffy, managing
director of Ipsos Mori’s Social Research Institute of the findings.

In addition, more than a quarter of individuals in this age group
live with their parents. An average woman in this age group today waits
7.1 years longer to become married than in 1981; and the average age of
childbirth for young families is nearly four years later than those in
1974.

“My greatest worry is working all my life, constantly chasing debt
and never being to own a house or have children,” writes a millennial
named “Gemma” in a section of the series entitled “#Itsnotjustyou: Millenials share their secret fears.”
Continuing, she states: “The cost of renting privately is rising, the
cost of travelling is rising, the cost of living is rising and yet the
salaries don’t reflect this rise. … I am worried that capitalism is
pushing this and creating a greater wealth inequality gap. It seems
unsustainable and to be driving people apart—a recent example is the
demonization of our own NHS service and the junior doctors.” Many others
share similar nightmares.

The study comes amid other findings revealing similar declines in
living standards for youth in the developed world. A 2013 Organization
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report found nearly 30
million youth in the developed capitalist countries without a job or an
education, the basic requirements for functioning in society.

The circumstances faced by young people throughout the world speak to
a systemic breakdown of the social order in both the so-called
developing and advanced countries, which has been compounded by war and
militarism, consecutive attacks on living standards and cuts to social
programs, which invariably hit the youngest and most vulnerable the
hardest. Though not covered by the study, European nations such as
Greece have been reduced to conditions unseen in the developed world,
with youth unemployment at over 60 percent due to attacks on living
standards demanded by the European Union and enforced by consecutive
governments, both right and “left,” under Syriza.
The authors of the Guardian investigation, in an effort to
divert rising anger away from the social system responsible for the
poverty, destruction of living standards and attendant social misery,
single out the relatively-better off living conditions of retirees in
order to make a case for attacking pensions and other benefits accruing
to the older generation. The publication quotes a recently published
interview with Mario Draghi, head of the European Central Bank (ECB),
who states “in many countries the labor market is set up to protect
older ‘insiders’—people with permanent, high-paid contracts and shielded
by strong labor laws. … The side-effect is that young people are stuck
with lower-paid, temporary contracts and get fired first in crisis
times.”

Rather than receiving expanded employment, pay and access to better
living conditions, it is proposed that the young and the old fight over
the rapidly diminishing resources made available by bourgeois public
officials and the wealthy. While Draghi advocates attacking the pay and
benefits of older workers, the ECB head has funneled billions into the
hands of European banking institutions; recently upping the monthly
total of cash infusions to €80 billion from €60 billion previously and
adding to the wealth of the financial elite.

The fate of retirement benefits and wages under the profit-system is
pointed to when the newspaper notes “pensioners’ incomes are likely to
rise for at least the next decade, after which future generations will
be unlikely to benefit [due to] a drop in home ownership, weaker private
sector pension schemes and the expectation that state pensions will be
less generous in the future.”

OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS: SERVE THE RICH, WALL STREET CRONIES AND LA RAZA, THE MEX FASCIST PARTY of AMERICA....

Then
hand what is left of the American middle class the tax bills for
bailouts and Mexico's crime wave in our open borders and LA RAZA "The
Race" welfare state on our backs!

"The
Clinton family charities have outsourced many U.S. white-collar jobs to
foreign college graduates instead of hiring American college graduates."

March 11, 2016

Oops! Clinton Foundation outsourced tech jobs to H-1B visa holders

The
Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, which does “wonderful
work” (if you ask Hillary), also has sought to hire a lot of foreign
tech workers brought to the country under the H-1B visa program to fill jobs Americans supposedly can’t be found to perform. Breitbart reports:

The
Clinton family charities have outsourced many U.S. white-collar jobs to
foreign college graduates instead of hiring American college graduates.The
outsourcing started in 2004 and it continues to this year. When asked
if the foundation is still hiring foreign white-collar workers via the
controversial H-1B visa program, Vena Cooper, one of the foundation’s personnel officers, responded “We do.”The
foundations declined to answer questions from Breitbart News, but
available data shows they sought to hire up to 130 foreign graduates.
That’s roughly half the number of 250 jobs outsourced by Disney last
October, which has reignited political criticism of the middle-class outsourcing program. The
130 foreign graduates sought by the Clinton’s foundations were and are
not immigrants. Instead, they’re temporary “guest” workers who fill outsourced professional jobs for up to six years. The
Clintons’ foreign graduates have been hired via the H-1B visa program
that also is used by Disney and U.S. corporations and universities to
employ a population of roughly 650,000 young and cheap foreign
professionals in business, design, healthcare, software, science, education, p.r. and media and pharmaceutical jobs. After their six years in the United States, most H-1Bs return
home with the work-experience and connections that help them compete against U.S. professionals in the global marketplace. The
young foreign H-1B professionals are also used to push down average
salaries earned by experienced and older American professionals. In
turn, those salary cuts boost profit margins and company values on Wall Street.

Hey,
those private jets and 5-star luxury hotels favored by the traveling
Clintons don’t come cheap, so they’ve got to pinch pennies wherever they
can. And besides, a lot of their money comes from foreign sources, so
they’re just returning it to some of the home countries.

US employment report: Payrolls rise, wages fall

By
Barry Grey
5 March 2016

President Barack Obama seized on the February employment report,
released Friday morning by the Labor Department, to tout the supposed
“success” of his economic policies and paint a picture of a thriving US
economy. The report, which showed a larger-than-predicted growth in
private nonfarm payrolls of 242,000 jobs, confirmed that the US economy
was “the envy of the world,” Obama told reporters at a White House
appearance.

“The fact of the matter is that the plans that we have put in place
to grow the economy have worked,” he boasted.” He derided “an
alternative reality out there from some of the political folks that
America is down in the dumps.” He countered, “America is pretty darn
great right now.”

He did not attempt to explain why the “alternative reality,” which
his labor secretary, Thomas Perez, attributed to “fear-mongers and
fact-deniers,” is believed by tens of millions of Americans, whose anger
over economic injustice is dramatically reflected in the current
election campaign.

One does not have to look too closely at the Labor Department’s
report, however, to get an idea of what is fueling the social
indignation of working people in the eighth and final year of the Obama
administration. Behind the top-line number for new jobs and the
quasi-fictional official unemployment rate of only 4.9 percent, ongoing
trends with disastrous consequences for the working class are evident.
They account for two other important indices in the report: a decline in
average earnings from the previous month of 3 cents, or 0.1 percent, to
$25.35, bringing the increase for the year down to just 2.2 percent,
and a fall in the average private-sector workweek of 0.2 hours to 34.4
hours, a two-year low.

These two figures arise from the fact that the vast bulk of new jobs
created in February were low-wage and a huge percentage were part-time.
The low-paying service sector—retail, bars and restaurants, health
care—accounted for 245,000 jobs. The reality of recession in basic
production was reflected in a 16,000 decline in manufacturing and the
loss of another 19,000 mining jobs, bringing to 171,000 the total
decline in mining since September 2014. The only better-paying
industrial sector that saw an increase was construction, which recorded a
gain of 19,000.

Another figure highlights the hollow and socially regressive
character of Obama’s so-called “recovery.” The financial cable network
CNBC pointed out that according to the Labor Department’s household
survey, which is the basis for the unemployment rate figure (the figure
on payroll growth is derived from a separate survey of business
establishments), full-time jobs increased in February by only 65,000,
while part-time positions increased by 489,000. This means that a mere
11.7 percent of new jobs in February were full-time!

These statistics point to the fact that the American ruling class,
through its instrument, the Obama administration, has utilized the
financial crash of 2008, for which it was responsible, to fundamentally
reorganize the US economy, transforming it into a low-wage system. The
millions of decent-paying jobs that were destroyed have been largely
replaced by poverty-wage, part-time and temporary jobs.

The median household income has fallen sharply. Pensions and health
benefits have been gutted, schools closed by the thousands, teachers and
other public workers laid off by the millions. At the other end, the
Federal Reserve and the US Treasury have pumped trillions of dollars
into the financial markets, driving up the stock market and bringing the
concentration of wealth at the very top to unprecedented levels. This
is what Obama lauds as “success.”

Meanwhile, millions of Americans remain mired in long-term
unemployment. The number of long-term unemployed, defined as without
work for 27 weeks or more, was essentially unchanged at 2.2 million in
February. This number has not shifted significantly since last June. The
long-term jobless accounted last month for 27.7 percent of the
unemployed, a far higher percentage than in any previous period
categorized as an economic recovery.

A broader measure of unemployment that includes people working
part-time but wanting full-time work and those too discouraged to seek
employment registered 9.7 percent last month, nearly double the official
jobless rate. There are, in addition, millions of people who have
dropped out of the labor market and are not even counted in government
employment reports.

While the employment-to-population ratio edged up to 59.8 percent and
the labor force participation rate rose slightly to 62.9 percent, both
measures remain extraordinarily low by historical standards.
The impact of soaring social inequality and falling living standards
for broad sections of the population is reflected in a growing crisis in
the retail sector. This week, sporting goods chain The Sports Authority
filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and announced it was closing
at least 140 of its 463 stores and laying off 3,400 of its 13,000
employees. This follows recent announcements by Walmart, Sears/Kmart and
Macy’s of hundreds of store closures and thousands of layoffs.

Hillary
Clinton repeatedly claims that she is the champion of the little guy.
It has always been a risible claim, but if any of her supporters
(including at the Post) are actually paying attention to the scoundrel,
this latest gambit ought to disabuse them of the notion.

March 7, 2016

The last refuge of the scoundrel Hillary

Samuel
Johnson’s aphorism that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel
doesn’t apply to Hillary Clinton in her email scandal, because nobody –
not even her die-hard supporters – would believe her if she said that
she set up the private email server in the interests of the United
States. Rather, the last refuge of this scoundrel is to blame everybody
else she dealt with at the State Department, in the process impugning
not only her own close aides, but career diplomats and other
nonpolitical professionals who deserve better.

This
strategy is reflected in the campaign’s current mantra that
“everybody,” including former secretaries Colin Powell and Condoleezza
Rice, at one time or another sent emails that were later determined to
be classified. A recent Washington Post analysis of Hillary’s released
classified emails demonstrates that she directly sent at least 104
to various aides and officials, and that they too, including the
current secretary of state, John Kerry, occasionally sent out emails
through nonsecure servers that were later deemed classified. However,
what the analysis also shows is that these government officials, when
they did use unsecured servers, at least used government accounts, which
provide a measure of security, not a private home-brewed server like
Mrs. Clinton’s.The
Post’s news editors must be popping a lot of Thorazine, because their
coverage of Clinton is increasingly schizophrenic. As longtime readers
of the paper know, the news operation is considerably more left-leaning
than the editorial side (which occasionally takes a more centrist
view). News stories are routinely slanted to present the most favorable
liberal perspective and mock or demean opposing outlooks. This
tendency is apparent in the Clinton case as well. The Post has broken
some important stories in the email scandal, like the recent revelation that the Justice Department granted former Clinton I.T. aide Bryan Pagliano immunity. And the Post’s most heroic figures, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein,
have separately suggested that the Clinton scandal is the real thing.
But since Hillary is the Post’s gal, they seeded the Pagliano report
with expert liberal analysis that suggested that the immunity deal is
either nothing to get excited about (a weird way to promote a scoop) or
actually a good thing for Clinton, while omitting contrary interpretations.

The
Post’s analysis of her emails follows the same pattern. On the one
hand, the news that Clinton herself personally authored over 100
classified items cuts against her chosen narrative that she got a lot of
emails and that she can hardly have been expected to actually read and
analyze them all for security issues as she received them or passed them
on. On the other hand, the article goes out of its way to suggest that
this was an endemic problem at State. And strangely again, the
explanation is rather contradictory. We are told that the sending and
receipt of classified information was the result of poor security
procedures that preceded Clinton’s arrival. But we are also told (in
line with claims made by Clinton and her campaign) that there is a
culture of “over-classification” in the government. So which is it?
Were officials at State too lax about security procedures or too anal?
If nothing else, one thing this controversy demonstrates is that the
Clinton State Department was pretty much a mess.

But
besides the country itself, which is now enduring yet more Clintonian
malfeasance in the midst of a critical election, are many individuals
that Clinton is cold-bloodily demeaning in an attempt to exonerate
herself with the “everybody did it” canard. This rests on the weak
premise that other government officials – aides, ambassadors, career
officials – occasionally misidentified information as innocuous or
insufficiently sensitive to merit security classification. There is
little doubt this happened, and continues to happen, as government
employees do their best to protect sensitive information but not bog the
government down in layers of unnecessary security protocol. But none
of the officials identified in the Post analysis did this deliberately
by establishing a private home-brewed email system to avoid State
Department classification procedures entirely – and this no less, by the
head of the State Department itself.

The
Post article anonymously quotes one poor soul (identified as a former
senior official) whose good name has now been impugned as a careless
operator: “I resent the fact that we are in this situation – and we’re
in this situation because of Hillary Clinton’s decision to use a private
email server.”

Hillary
Clinton repeatedly claims that she is the champion of the little guy.
It has always been a risible claim, but if any of her supporters
(including at the Post) are actually paying attention to the scoundrel,
this latest gambit ought to disabuse them of the notion.

ALL
HILLARY CLINTON DID AS SECRETARY of STATE, ARGUABLY ALL SHE DOES
PERIOD, IS SUCK UP TO MUSLIM DICTATORS, OBAMA'S CRONY BANKSTERS AND
CRIMINAL BILLIONAIRE CRONYIES OF BILLARY.... SO SHE AND BILLARY CAN SUCK
IN THOSE BIG BRIBES TO THEIR PHONY CLINTON FOUNDATION! OTHER
THAN THE TENS OF MILLIONS IN BRIBES SHE SUCKED UP AS SEC. OF STATE, HER
TENURE WAS AN UTTER DISASTERS AS WOULD BE ANOTHER WALL STREET BACKED
CLINTON ADMINISTRATION!